The case of Hotmail is one of the best known in the world of growth hacking and shows us that to carry out this type of strategy it is not necessary to have large budgets or make large investments in infrastructure (as in the case of McDonalds).
In 1996, even before Hotmail was acquired by Microsoft, one of its employees had a brilliant idea to expand its user base: include a marketing message at the bottom of each email sent . The underlying logic was that Hotmail users would send emails to their friends and that these would be similar to them, that is, the brand’s ideal potential customers. Since using their system was free, they made up for it by including advertising.
The first message they included was a simple “I love you. Get your free e-mail at Hotmail.” And with something that simple, they achieve spectacular results . Until then, Hotmail’s growth was linear, but after the inclusion of the message, they managed to double their user base from 500,000 to one million in six months. Five weeks later, there were already two million: they had manage to make the growth exponential.
3) Mailtrack
Mailtrack is a Spanish company that sells an email solution to find out if people who receive an email have read it or click on it. When the recipient reads an email, it is mark with a double click in the inbox and the system sends you a read notice.
Well, what Mailtrack did to hack its own growth was to copy Hotmail’s strategy… almost 20 years later! (Mailtrack’s growth hacking campaign launch in late 2013/early 2014.) So Mailtrack add a signature to its free messages and found that, years later, Hotmail’s solution still works. Today, Mailtrack has two million users and much of its success is due to the virality it generates, which manages to turn users into brand ambassadors.
The morale? There’s nothing new Cyprus Email List under the sun, and don’t be afraid to take inspiration from strategies that have work in the past. The principles of growth hacking are universal and remain effective across decades.
2) Hotmail
Hubspot is not only a fantastic example of growth hacking , but also of inbound marketing .
In this case, the solution they design to TR Numbers multiply their growth was a tool call Website Grader . You just have to enter the URL of your page and, for free, it analyzes different aspects, such as loading speed, adaptation to mobile devices, SEO or security. At the end, you get a score and a series of upgrade options.